Exploiting digitisation to increase B2B e-commerce

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It is esstimated that in 2020 B2B e-commerce in EU will be twice as large as B2C in terms of sales which proves a huge unreleased potential for EU SMEs. There is a risk of being surpassed by frontrunners as most SMEs have not even taken the first step in this direction. Succeeding with B2B e-commerce requires a hugh turn-around within the company's internal processes as this may scale up the turnover dramatically. Digitising and automatising the internal processes of the SME is key to manage and keep up with the hugh upscaling due to global e-commece while ensuring the economic profit. Creating a Digital Single Market (DSM) is one of the top ten priorities of the European Commission. The overall objective is to bring down barriers, regulatory or otherwise unlock online opportunities in Europe to create one borderless market with harmonized legislation and rules for the benefit of businesses throughout Europe. This is stated by the EC in the 6 May 2015 DSM strategy aiming to to remove key differences between the online and offline worlds and to break down barriers to cross-border online activity and thereby improve B2B e-commerce. FuturE.com adress policy makers and business support agencies across EU who need to fully understand the key barriers for SMEs to exploit and benefit from a global internet driven market place in general and enhance digitisation and automisation in particular. This is done by the exchange of experiences and good practices across 8 EU regions in FuturE.com. The main output will be elaboration of an Action Plan per region, based on the interregional exchanges. The knowledge and capacity gained by the partners will enable the design of new initiatives and/or business support programmes which compare with best practice. In the end, the monitoring of the implemented initiatives will improve the impact from the regional policy instruments adressed by the FuturE.com partners and the results will be disseminated across EU.

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